Re: Ironies abound (was Re: GPL v3 draft)
On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 04:08:31PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
> > You're asking me to repeat the entire discussion I just had with you and
> > Michael, where I explained very explicitly the serious problems of patch
> > clauses? If you've accidentally deleted your mailbox, I'm sure it's in
> > the list archives.
>
> No, you've described why they cause practical inconvenience. You haven't
> described why everyone else ever was wrong.
No, I've described why they practically *prohibit* code reuse. The only
counterarguments I've ever seen are:
- "code reuse isn't important" (often thinly veiled as eg. "you don't
really need to reuse code, you can always rewrite it"), and
- "if you really want to reuse code, you can create a complex, massively
impractical patching system to handle it" (and I'm not convinced that's
even possible, when two separate patch-clause code bits end up mashed
closely together).
Now you're not even giving an argument; you're merely appealing to the
crowd. Since it would take a GR to fix this, anyway, that's not very
interesting; if the crowd really does agree with you that code reuse
isn't very important, such a GR would fail.
--
Glenn Maynard
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